For a few transgender Americans, this has been a year of glamour and fame. For many others, 2015 has been fraught with danger, violence and mourning.
While Caitlyn Jenner made the cover of Vanity Fair and Laverne Cox prospered as a popular actress, other transgender women have become homicide victims at an alarming rate. By the count of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, there have been 22 killings so far this year of transgender or gender-nonconforming people – including 19 black or Latina transgender women.
The toll compares with 12 last year and 13 in 2013, and is the highest since advocacy groups began such tallies a decade ago.
“Most Americans think it’s been an amazing year for transgender rights,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “But for the transgender community, it’s been one of the most traumatic years on record.”
Death by death, the details are horrific. Kiesha Jenkins was beaten and shot dead by a cluster of assailants in Philadelphia. Tamara Dominguez was run over multiple times and left to die on a Kansas City street. Police said the most recent victim, Zella Ziona, was fatally shot in Gaithersburg, Maryland, last month by a boyfriend embarrassed that Ziona showed up in the presence of some of his other friends.
“She was just amazing,” a friend, Barbie Johnson, told NBC Washington the day after the killing. “When Zella’s around, there’s not a single frown in the room.”
There’s no question that anti-transgender hatred has fueled many of the killings, yet activists and social-service professionals say there are multiple factors that make transgender women of color vulnerable. They have documented that numerous victims were killed by intimate partners, and many were murdered while engaging in prostitution.
“For many of these women, it’s chronic unemployment or participation in survival sex work,” said Louis Graham, a professor of community health education at the University of Massachusetts who has studied the experiences of black transgender women.
Many are beset by homelessness and economic desperation, sometimes ending up in coercive and violent relationships, Graham said.
Chase Strangio, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT Rights Project, said that for many perpetrators of the violence, “there’s a sense of transgender people being less than human.”
The high death toll this year may stem in part from greater awareness of anti-transgender violence, and more vigorous efforts by activists and police to identify homicide cases in which this was a factor.
“The violence has been going on for a long time,” said Chai Jindasurat of the New York City Anti-Violence Project. “We’re now able to identify and document and report on it better.”
Asked about solutions to the crisis, activists say there are no easy answers.
“We need multiple strategies, aiming for sweeping cultural change,” said Jindasurat. “The more people understand what it means to be transgender, the more accepting they will be. A piece of it has to be about changing hearts and minds.”
Yet many Americans are uncomfortable with and biased against transgender people, Jindasurat said. He cited the recent referendum in Houston, where opponents of a nondiscrimination ordinance prevailed by stoking fears about transgender people’s access to public restrooms.
In Milwaukee, an organization called FORGE is tackling the problem of intimate partner violence, noting in a recent report that many of the transgender homicide victims were killed by people close to them.
“That means they were likely not victims of a random anti-trans hate crime,” said the report, which urged transgender people to get out of unsafe relationships. It also offered tips on how they can be safer when dating.
“We cannot prevent all violence that may be directed our way,” the report said. “But we can take steps to lower the chances we are harmed by the people we live with or date.”
Attorney Mik Kinkead of the New York-based Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which advocates on behalf of transgender people, said, “It’s often someone we know who hurts us – someone in our community” – and that’s challenging to address.
Transgender prostitution is another harrowing issue.
Stefanie Rivera, now client services director with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, says she engaged in sex work starting as a 12-year-old in the early 1990s in Los Angeles. “The fact that I’m here at 36 – I don’t know how I made it so far. I had so many close calls,” she said, describing an assault by one client that left her bleeding on the pavement.
She attributed some of the violence to men who were physically attracted to transgender women but were ashamed of that attraction.
“They’re people who are struggling within themselves,” Rivera said.
Rivera said two of her transgender friends were killed while engaged in sex work in Los Angeles, one in 1997 and the other in 2004.
The latter was Felicia Moreno; police said she was slain by a Marine who initially did not realize the prostitute was transgender and shot her after discovering that. The Marine was subsequently shot dead by police following a high-speed chase.
When transgender prostitutes are killed, it’s common but wrong to engage in “victim blaming,” said Nellie Fitzpatrick of the Philadelphia LGBT Office.
“Just because someone is a sex worker doesn’t mean their life is worth less,” she said. “There is layer upon layer of marginalization and bias that pushes people further away from where they can have safe, happy and fulfilling lives.”
In Detroit, Yvonne Siferd has worked with many transgender women as director of victim services for Equality Michigan, an LGBT-rights group. While impressed by their resilience and mutual support, she’s dismayed by the challenges they face.
“We all grow up with this myth that you can be whatever you want when you grow up,” Siferd said. “When you do grow up and become your authentic self, the fact that you could be targeted for just being you is terrifying.”
On the Net
National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs: www.avp.org/about-avp/coalitions-a-collaborations/82-national-coalition-of-anti-violence-programs
Human Rights Campaign-TPOCC report on anti-transgender violence: http://tinyurl.com/olyacra
